Autodesk Powers the Future
of Manufacturing and Construction with Forge

23 November 2017

Partnership with Dropbox and an Investment in
Assemble Systems enables better cloud collaboration

By Brian Roepke, senior director, Forge Product
Management

At Autodesk University,
Autodesk announced that developers and customers of all sizes are
adopting its Forge developer platform to build and deploy apps and
services to drive the future of making things in manufacturing and
construction. A new platform update has also been launched to make
building on Forge even easier.

Next-generation cloud application framework

The design and engineering world is undergoing a
major disruption from a single-user, file-based, desktop CAD experience
to a deeply collaborative, highly tailored and simple-to-use database in
the
cloud CAD environment. To help with the ongoing efforts in
streamlining end-to-end workflows, the Reality Capture API is now
available. Autodesk will soon launch a host of new capabilities on
Forge, including enhancements to the BIM 360 API and the Design
Automation API will soon be available for integration with Autodesk
Revit and Autodesk Inventor.

Additionally, a new Webhooks API will let Forge users
quickly and easily connect their applications to popular 3rd party apps.
Autodesk is also working to release new platform solutions that sits on
top of a powerful cloud service that enables our customers to build on
the Forge platform and deliver custom solutions and workflows to their
audience. The Forge Application Framework
Software Development Kit will contain re-usable and modular
components including High Frequency Data Management, Solid Modeling and
Web Graphics to customize the Forge experience, as well as tools for
easy app building and publishing.

Cloud-native and always connected, Forge is the
platform from which Autodesk is building industry specific experiences
spanning design, make and use for each of our major industries,
including manufacturing and industrialized construction. In a new
partnership with Dropbox,
Forge is being leveraged to enable native .DWG preview capabilities
directly within Dropbox. With 35 new .DWG files being added every
second, Dropbox is one of the largest repositories of Autodesk design
files and is working with Forge to enable better collaboration for its
business users.

“AutoCAD is one of the most widely used applications
among architecture, engineering, construction and manufacturing
professionals, and with more than 1.5 billion .DWG files stored in
Dropbox, we’ve built one of the largest collaboration networks of
Autodesk design files in the world,” said Billy Blau, global head of
business development and partnerships at Dropbox. “Dropbox brings teams
together by making content collaboration simple and efficient. Our
technology partnership with Autodesk is an exciting step in
delivering innovative features that our customers have been asking for.”

Today, Autodesk announced the fourth Autodesk Forge
Fund investment in five months by leading the funding round for Assemble
Systems, Inc. Assemble Systems provides a SaaS platform that consumes
BIM models, drawings and point clouds enabling construction
professionals to condition, query and connect the data to key workflows.
These include bid management, estimating, project management, scheduling
and finance as the adoption of BIM and cloud technologies continues to
accelerate across the construction industry. The Assemble Systems
investment and integration with Forge strengthens the BIM
360 pre-construction offering and accelerates our support for data
management, quantification, estimation and other associated workflows.

Assemble extracts and federates models from Autodesk
Revit, AutoCAD and other design systems into a project. This enables
the customer to group, sort and filter the data from multiple models
easily into usable construction packages. These can be used for
quantification, estimating, shared subcontractor views and other
workflows. As the design models change, Assemble checks for those
changes and reports on the impact to the project quantity, cost and
schedule. This use of Building Information Models makes construction
much easier and more reliable.

Recently, the Autodesk Forge Fund invested in three
startups building the future of industrialized construction. To meet
growing demand and improve profitability and productivity in the
construction industry, Autodesk invested in SmartVid.io, ManufactOn
and Project Frog. Construction is beginning to look a lot like
manufacturing, which will reduce risk and increase margins. Autodesk
calls this industrialized construction, and the Forge Fund is creating
an ecosystem of companies to make the job of construction smarter,
simpler and safer.

“Autodesk’s momentum with Forge Fund investments
capitalizes on Autodesk cloud technology to create tools and workflows
that are meeting new market demands as industrialized construction and
manufacturing become a more integral part of AEC project workflows,”
said Jim Lynch, Autodesk vice president of construction products. “The
building industry is beginning to look a lot more like manufacturing
than traditional construction and our Forge Fund investments and
integrations will improve productivity, resulting in decreased risk and
increased profit margins for construction teams and owners.”